Elizabeth Bowen and The Last September

A class does not always end with its houses burning. Sometimes it ends earlier, in a quiet upstairs room, in the hand of one of its own daughters, when she sits down at a desk and writes the burning before it has happened, and so converts a doomed political-economic settlement into a sentence that will outlast the settlement itself. The fire on the page is the first admission. After that, the bricks are only a question of time.

THE INHERITANCE

She is the only child of Henry Cole Bowen and Florence Colley, born at 15 Herbert Place on the seventh of June 1899, schooled at Downe House in Kent, married since 1923 to Alan Cameron of the Northampton Education Authority. Her father's people have held the land at Farahy since the Cromwellian grants of the seventeenth century; her own line of Bowens has held the house at Farahy since her great-great-grandfather built it in 1775, three storeys of cut limestone above the Munster bogland, square and sash-windowed and entirely without apology. She is the heir. There is no brother. The house, the demesne, the rent-roll thinned by the Wyndham Act, the library, the avenue of beeches, the responsibility, all of it will come to her, and she has known since girlhood that what will come to her is, by the political weather of the country she was born into, already a thing being given up.

THE SPRING OF 1929

It is an afternoon in April 1929, in the writing-room on the first floor, pale Munster light through the south casement, the desk turned to the window so the page takes the light from her left. She is twenty-nine. She will be thirty in June. On the desk are three hundred and eighteen foolscap sheets of typescript, the second novel, called for the present The Last September, set at a house called Danielstown in the summer of 1920. Danielstown is Bowen's Court. The Naylors are not the Bowens, and Lois Farquar at nineteen is not herself at twenty, but the gravel of the avenue is her gravel, the tennis lawn is her tennis lawn, the cracked stucco of the gate-lodge is the gate-lodge she walked past a thousand times as a child. She has been nine years, since the summer the novel records, writing herself out of that summer. The pencil is in her right hand. There is one more revision pass to do.

THE WRITING-ROOM

The room is quiet. Below the casement the rooks are at the beech-tops. She knows the chronology she is fixing onto the page with a precision that has nothing of nostalgia in it: the summer of 1920, before the truce of July 1921, before the Treaty of December 1921, before the Free State of 1922, before the Land Acts of 1923 and the ones still to come that will finish what Wyndham began. She has set the novel exactly at the last summer in which her class could still pretend, over the tea-tray and the tennis party and the British subaltern come over from Clonmel, that the question of the country was a question that could be answered without them being answered with it. By August of that summer the columns were burning houses thirty miles away. By the autumn the burnings had reached the Mitchelstown country. Bowen's Court itself was not burned; the local column under Liam Lynch followed a different policy from Tom Barry's in the west, and the luck of geography spared the limestone walls she is now sitting inside. The novel does not spare them. The novel ends with Danielstown going up in the autumn of 1920, three figures on the gravel watching the windows blaze, because that, in plain reading, is the ending the class earned, and she is not in the business of softening the ending for her own sake.

She picks up the page on which Danielstown burns. Above the steps, the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace, she has written, and she leaves the line standing. She thinks of her father in his Dublin chambers, of her mother dead at Hythe in 1912 when she was thirteen, of the avenue at dusk, of the rector at Farahy, of the tenants whose grandfathers her grandfather's grandfather displaced. To write the house's ending is not disloyalty. It is the only loyalty left that does not lie. The class she belongs to has produced soldiers and judges and barristers and a great quantity of polite incomprehension; it has not, until now, produced its own witness. She intends to be the witness. I suppose all this is the result of an inherent provincialism, she will write later of her own people, which produced, in the end, no statesmen, and the sentence is already, this April afternoon, the angle from which she is looking down at the typescript. The witness has to be from inside the house. The witness has to know the smell of the linen-press and the sound of the gong for dinner and the particular silence that fell at the dining-table when a name from the column was spoken in the village. Nobody outside the house can do this. Nobody else inside the house has tried. She is, by the accident of being the only child of the only line that is left, the one who has to.

She makes a small correction in pencil to the third line of the page. The rooks settle. The light shifts a quarter of an inch along the desk. She does not stop.

THE PARCEL TO LONDON

In late April the typescript goes by post to Michael Sadleir at Constable in London, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, the address in her own hand. Constable set it for autumn publication. The first edition of two thousand five hundred copies is published on the twenty-eighth of September 1929. It sells through by Christmas. A second edition of two thousand is printed in January 1930. The Times Literary Supplement of the second of October calls it the most accomplished second novel by an Anglo-Irish writer of the present generation; the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian follow. None of the reviewers in London quite see what the book is. They take it for a delicate study of a young woman's summer. It is also that. It is also the obituary, written in advance and from the inside, of a class of about five thousand families in a country of three million people, and the woman who wrote it is the heir of one of those families, and she is sitting in the house that the book has just burned.

THE HOUSE AFTER

Her father dies in 1930. She inherits Bowen's Court outright. She keeps it through the nineteen-thirties on the strength of her London earnings, writes The House in Paris in 1935 and The Death of the Heart in 1938, returns to it through the war years while filing reports to the Ministry of Information from a Dublin she crossed the Irish Sea to listen in, publishes The Heat of the Day in 1949, writes the family history Bowen's Court in 1942 because she has understood by then that the house is a thing she will outlive and must therefore record. She holds on until 1959. The repairs outrun the rents. She sells, in the expectation that the purchaser will live there. He does not. He demolishes the house in 1960 for the value of the cut limestone and the timber and the lead from the roofs. The avenue of beeches is felled. The walled garden is left. She is told the news in England and she records, in print, that she is glad she was not present. She had already, in 1929, written the ending. The 1960 demolition was a second copy of a manuscript she had filed thirty-one years earlier.

THE GRAVE AT FARAHY

She dies at the Pelican Hotel in Hythe in Kent on the twenty-second of February 1973, seventy-three years old, of lung cancer. She is brought home to Farahy and buried in the parish churchyard ten yards from the foundations of the house, beside her father, under a flat slab. The parish church and the surviving walled garden are kept by the Elizabeth Bowen Society of Ireland. There are no walls left to point to. There is the line of the avenue, which the eye can still find in the grass, and there is the slab, and there is the book, in print continuously since 1929, which is now the only standing structure of the demesne. A class is ended not by those who oppose it but, occasionally, by one of its own who is honest enough to put the ending into sentences while the house is still up. The honesty is a form of inheritance. It is the form that lasts. On the flat slab at Farahy, beside her father, the name is cut in the deep serif of country masonry, four letters, and below the name the dates, and below the dates the grass, and beyond the grass the rectangle in the ground where the writing-room used to be.